Google Apps

Google will soon roll out invites for their Inbox email app to some Google Apps customers. First launched in October 2014, Inbox is a new, Gmail-based take on email management. The roll out begins in March, with Google choosing a select few companies for the early adopter program at first, wanting to work with each business closely.

If you have a Gmail or Google apps account that has two-step verification enabled, the process of linking your account to your iPhone or iPad is slightly different, as you may have found out if you attempted to sign in and got an incorrect password error. This is because you'll need to generate an app-specific password for your iPhone or iPad in order to securely link them to your Gmail or Google Apps account.

Google Hangouts, the combination instant messaging (IM), video, audio, and VoIP calling app for iPhone and iPad, has been updated to version 2.0. That means an iOS 7 make-over, iPad optimization, 10-second audio recordings, and most importantly — animated stickers! (Joking! The most important update is the ability to vanquish the appalling shake-to-send feedback non-feature!)

Google has released Google Admin, an app to manage Google Apps users, groups, passwords, and more. The app is designed for use with Google Apps for Business, Education, Government, Google Coordinate and Chromebooks.

It appears that Google is having trouble with some of their services, including Gmail. Gmail did experience a complete outage, though Google says that service has been restored to several users, and now it, Google Documents, and Google Presentations users are seeing service disruptions. Google expects full service to be restored within the hour.

If you have multiple Gmail accounts set up in the Gmail app for iPhone and iPad, you may not need to receive push notifications for new messages for every single account. Luckily with the Gmail app, your options aren't all or nothing. You can easily choose what accounts you'd like to receive notifications for.

Google has released what they call the first version of their Adsense app for iOS. It's iPhone only at the moment, though of course it'll run, boxed, on the iPad as well. With Adsense for iPhone you can look up key earnings information, top custom and URL channels, ad units and sites reports, and payment alerts.

Looks like Google Apps and Gmail are having some issues today, with tons of you telling us you're experiencing problems of one type or another. For my part, I'm getting authentication errors, but then I use Gmail in Mail.app. Yeah. Google Apps Status Dashboard is showing it's not us, it's them.

With Google's latest generation of better designed iOS apps, including Google+, Gmail, YouTube, Google Search, Google Maps, Chrome, and more, the iPhone 5 is once again among the very best Google phones on the planet. iOS may not enjoy the deep integration into everything Google that Android does, but for most things, the overall performance of the iPhone, and the ability to use the best of Google alongside the best of Apple, all on one device, makes for an incredibly compelling experience.

And it's been a while since any Apple or Google user could attest to that with anything approaching conviction.